Debugging a BOSH Release and it subsequent deployment can be challenging, but there are a few tricks which can ease the burden (e.g. preventing the tear-down of the compilation VM in order to troubleshoot the failure in vivo).

So, you’ve been programming for a while now, but you’ve been using one stack. Let’s say you’ve been building web applications with Java, Javascript and HTML. New languages or frameworks seem like fun, but you are worried that you won’t be able to convince your manager that it will be worthwhile to try something new.

At this year’s RailsConf I am going to be teaching the workshop: Get started with Component-Based Rails applications! It is a 90 minute session that gets you from 0 to 10 components in 90 minutes. The session is in the Labs track and will be held on day 1, Tuesday, April 21 at 3:50pm.

BOSH is a tool that (among other things) deploys VMs. In this blog post we cover the procedure to create a BOSH release for a DNS server, customizing our release with a manifest, and then deploying the customized release to a VirtualBox VM.

The buzz around the microservice way of architecting software systems is taking hold across the Internet. Many people are trying to figure out what this means for their deployment strategy and their DevOps folks. Cloud Foundry provides great support for deploying these types of applications and this will be the first in a series of posts that will show how to effectively deploy a microservices architecture to Cloud Foundry. We will start with a single service and build up to a web or multiple services that talk to each other.

As a tech consultant, I help companies optimize how they build software. I talk to a lot of people about implementing new practices and processes that will help them put the user value at the center of the development practice. But with many of the companies I work with full assimilation of these concepts is a distant goal.

You have a vision of your system’s architecture in your head. How do you share that with your team?

Do Whiteboard Architecture. At Pivotal Labs, our teams do Agile Inceptions [1] to plan out a few months worth of work. Just after an inception is when you have a rough sense of what you’re going to be working on in the upcoming iterations.

As part of the Cloud Foundry team, we’ve been working on building stemcells as part of the BOSH project, adding CentOS 7 and RHEL 7 targets. During our work, we found it efficient to run builds of several stemcells in parallel.